COLUMBUS, Ohio — Don’t let the score fool you. NHL coaches often demand their clubs skate north with the puck, eschewing a more leisurely east and west approach. If the Columbus Blue Jackets skated in a predominant direction on Tuesday, it was south. Yeah, backward.
The first two periods of the Blue Jackets’ 5-3 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers were particularly ugly, but even the third period was not enough to gloss over this steaming pile.
“We turned the puck back more tonight than we ever have,” Blue Jackets coach Dean Evason said. “That tells you that we’re getting caught from behind, so we don’t feel comfortable going forward. You automatically turn back, or you move the puck back. All you do is invite a forecheck and invite them to be more aggressive. We just fed into that, because of what we didn’t do.
“For the most part, we don’t do that. We haven’t done that. Even in the games we lost out on the road, we were still playing hard, going north, playing the right way. Tonight we played south and we played soft.”
Just down the hallway, Flyers coach John Tortorella had to be beaming. His club is still in the growing pains stages of a roster rebuild, but they do play hard under the firebrand coach, who once pushed this Columbus franchise to new heights in the late 2010s.
The Flyers led 3-0 on the scoreboard, 17-6 on the shot counter and 47-14 in shot attempts until the final five minutes of the second period. For a Blue Jackets club that beat NHL-leading Winnipeg 4-1 on the road Sunday, this was a significant crash back to Earth.
“We started slow and we never really found ourselves,” Blue Jackets defenseman Zach Werenski said. “It’s tough to come out like that after a good win in Winnipeg. (The Flyers) are structured. They played hard. They don’t give you much. You have to work for it. I don’t think we worked for it tonight. We kinda got what we deserved, I guess.”
Kent Johnson had a goal and an assist, while Werenski and Sean Monahan also scored. Goaltender Elvis Merzlikins stopped only 19 of 24 shots, allowing at least two goals from distance that brought groans from the Nationwide Arena crowd.
The only glimmer of hope came at 16:56 of the second period when Werenski scored a power-play goal to cut the Flyers’ lead to 3-1. But before the end of the second, with 1:00 remaining, the Flyers restored their three-goal margin with Travis Konecny’s second goal of the game.
“Terrible,” Evason said. “We had some life and then we give them a semi-breakaway and it ends up in our net. That hurt us as much as the start did.”
These Blue Jackets have provided quite a few head-scratchers already this season. Before Tuesday’s game, the Blue Jackets were 10-10-0 against clubs above them in the standings. Yet they’re 1-2-3 against the bottom five teams in the league.
Evason tried desperately to shake the doldrums, he said.
“We were crackin’ our heads in between periods trying to do what we could do as far as trying to jump-start us,” Evason said. “We had nothing. Absolutely nothing, which is disappointing, obviously. We should have had more in this game. I don’t care how many games we’ve played. You guys call it a trap game (when you come back home off the road) … that’s ridiculous. We knew they were going to work and in order for us to have success we’d have to at least match their work.
“We lost our puck battles. Everybody. There’s not one guy … I’m not going to mention a single player, because I think the entire group gets lumped together.”
Evason considered line changes, a coach’s age-old tactic to change his club’s luck. But the reason Evason didn’t change his lines is telling: everybody deserved to be dropped in the lineup, not elevated.
“We tried talking. We tried shifting some stuff,” Evason said. “You talk to guys individually. It’s funny … if it’s one guy or one line, you could single it out. It’s difficult when you don’t have even a line or guys pushing forward to go in the right direction.”
Evason was already looking forward to Wednesday’s practice, where he promised to “get a good burn and get our legs going.” The Blue Jackets host the Eastern Conference-leading Washington Capitals on Thursday.
(Photo of Elvis Merzlikins deflecting a shot: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
